Today’s lab went well, with very little intervention on my part. Students finished up their RC calculations, picked their resistors and capacitors, and got their relaxation oscillators working. They then adjusted their R or C values to bring the oscillator into spec, if needed. Most of the help I gave during all this was getting the students comfortable with using the Tektronix digital scopes, which have an extremely complicated and confusing menu system. The “autoset” feature on the scopes is almost essential, since they can have been left in any sort of weird state by the previous user, and finding and clearing all the weirdness takes a while.

Students then made their touch sensors (aluminum foil folded up to be sturdy, then wrapped with a layer of packing tape), and connected them to the oscillators. Most students got a substantial change in frequency, as expected, but one group had chosen a large C and small R, and so got almost no change. With only minimal prompting, they figured out why the frequency wasn’t changing, fixed their values and got it working.

The students did observe a change in frequency if they connected a scope probe to the input of the Schmitt trigger, and most eventually figured out that this meant that the scope probe was acting like a capacitor. When I did it with my scope probe at home, I got a change from 60kHz to 35.22kHz, about a 70% increase in the RC time constant. Since the capacitor I was using was 30pF, this looks like it implies a 21pF capacitance. It doesn’t make much difference whether I connect the scope ground to the ground or the 3.3v lead—the change in frequency is the same either way, so we’re seeing an effect due to capacitance, not due to current through the oscilloscope input resistance. I looked up the specs for the input capacitance of my probes, and it is supposed to be 20pF in 10× mode and 130pF in 1× mode. From that I worked out an approximate circuit for the probe:

Approximate circuit for my cheap 60MHz scope probes.

With the 1× probe setting, the 1MΩ input resistance of the oscilloscope matters—connecting up the scope drops the oscillation frequency to 5kHz if the ground of the scope is grounded, and stops oscillation completely if the ground of the scope is connected to 3.3v.

The Bitscope DP01 differential probe, with no jumper plugs in place (so 2:1 setting on the Bitscope screen) reduces the frequency from 59.7kHz to 38.6kHz, implying about a 16.5pF input capacitance, while the spec claims only 2.5pF differential and 5pF common-mode. I don’t seem to be able to get a signal on the BitScope screen with the differential probe in high-gain mode, and I’m not sure why (the voltages shouldn’t be exceeding the voltage limits). There may be some problem with powering both the BitScope and the device being tested from the same underlying USB power source, though it caused no problems in the low-gain mode.

Students soldered up the boards without problems. The only intermittent error that I had to help debug turned out to be a misuse of an alligator clip (the wire had not been screwed down, but only wrapped around the clip). No one soldered a chip in backwards and I did not need any of the spare boards or chips that I had brought along, just in case.

Luckily not everyone was ready to solder at the same time, as the lab support people had no board holders available, so only the two I brought from home were available. I’ll have to ask them to get some PanaVise juniors (about $27 each) or, if they are too cheap to buy them, then some alligator-clip-based board holders for about $7 each.

Some students had enough time after soldering up their boards that I showed them how to get the frequency information that the KL25Z program was reporting to the SDA USB serial port (using the Arduino Serial Monitor). Unfortunately, the old version of Windows running on the lab computers seems to have serious problems with cut-and-paste operations, and it was difficult to get more than a screenful of data that way.